Say Hello To The Future of Account-Based Marketing

The best marketing teams in the world have been flipping their funnels upside down and adopting account-based marketing.

But we realized there is one glaring issue with the way these teams are practicing account-based marketing.

When VIP leads reach your site, they are forced to fill out lead forms before they can talk to your sales team.

In other words, if you’re doing ABM today, you’re asking already qualified leads – that your sales team is dying to talk to – to re-qualify themselves by filling out a form that provides answers to questions you probably already know the answer to.

Do you see the problem?

Account-based marketing is supposed to be a zero-waste approach. Joe Chernov, CMO at InsightSquared explains, “it’s a model that targets only the companies and contacts that are likely to buy your product and that sales has pre-committed to try to close.”

Over the past few months, we’ve had a chance to re-think how account-based marketing might work in a world that runs on conversations.

Today, we are introducing the world’s first conversational ABM Platform: Drift ABM. No more forms for your VIPs.

How Account-Based Marketing Is Broken

“Let’s face it: to this point, ABM has been more about advertising than marketing. Success was demonstrating that you had an increase in site visits from target accounts. Try presenting the fluffy ‘uplift in target account visits’ metric to your head of sales and see how they react.”

Tom started using Drift ABM a couple days ago.

“With Drift ABM, you can now qualify your website visitors the same way you qualify leads and eliminate the friction of website forms that causes most people to go away.”

It all comes down to this: if ABM is supposed to be zero-waste, why are you giving your VIPs the form?

You’re losing those leads by giving them an impersonal experience.

That’s like having a neon “open” sign on your storefront and a padlock on the front door. Yeah some will crack the code, fill out all those required fields and submit the form, but most will bounce the second they see your eleven field form.

Instead of making your targeted accounts jump thru hoops to talk to your team, what if you offer them a personalized, real-time, one-on-one conversation?

With Drift ABM, now you can.

Doing account-based marketing with Drift is like rolling out the red carpet for your VIP prospects and standing by the front door to greet them.

How Drift ABM Works

Here’s how we designed Drift to work with your account-based marketing.

First you have to sync your accounts from Salesforce to Drift. Drift Enterprise users now have an Account View:

Then your reps will start receiving real-time notifications when people from those accounts visit your site.

But at Drift, we’re all about conversations. So those people – the people that you’re dying to talk to – will get a personalized welcome message from their designated account rep when they reach your website.

Now your dream customers can have conversations with the right person on your team.

If one of those dream customers responds to your welcome message, and you’re not there to talk, that’s fine. Our DriftBot will jump into the conversation and book a meeting for you.

And of course, you’ll get the reporting you need to check your team’s performance. That way you can see how many conversations are driven by your account-based marketing.

The best part? Once you’ve set it up, synced your account and created a welcome message, you can sit back and relax. Drift will identify those target accounts when they visit your site, prompt the welcome message and your reps will start seeing alerts when conversations are started.

To try Drift ABM, you need to be subscribed to Drift Enterprise, have a list of target accounts (preferably in Salesforce) and have Clearbit Reveal. Our team can help you get set up, just book a demo with us.

How Drift ABM Works With Other ABM Platforms

Is Drift ABM a replacement solution for Terminus, Demandbase, Engagio, Listenloop and others?

No.

In fact, Drift ABM is a perfect complement to your ABM stack. The rest of your ABM stack is really good at helping drive the right people to your website. Drift ABM can help you have real-time one-on-one conversations with those people.

We are also really pumped to announce our two ABM partners. We’ve been working with Clearbit to help our customers identify their target accounts with their enriched data. Their platform will continue to empower our customers with Drift ABM.

We are also excited to announce that we’ve partnered with AdRoll. AdRoll’s ABM platform helps marketers personalize ad placements at scale. More on this to come.

The Future of ABM Is Available Today

The other week I was talking to one of Drift’s customers, Zak Pines, about the future of account-based marketing after giving him a demo of Drift ABM. Zak has written and spoken extensively about account-based marketing.

“Account-based marketing should be embedded in all your existing marketing practices – both inbound and outbound. Marketing technology tools should adapt their products to help businesses do that. ABM shouldn’t be a separate tool or strategy. Drift is a perfect example of that.”